Lx=d: SundayResearch

I like to make a quiz like in the last article. But some of my friends said to me ``Many can live without knowing such things.'' That would be true. I even thought that it is natural that many people don't care about that. But recently I found some people deceive others by using this kind of wrong math. I feel sad when the honest people were deceived. Especially when I read a newspaper article that someone used this kind of wrong logic and stole some money from people. I think it may be good to know these kind of things not to be deceived by malicious people. The problem here is actually not exactly a mathematical problem, it is rather a language problem. If you understand the meaning of the problem, actually this is not so much math in there. Since the question is described in a language (originally in Japanese, here in English. I found it is interesting this worked for both languages), we need to understand what the problem means. Here we need to know what is the ...

A while ago, I taught mathematics to a thirteen years old boy. His family moved to another city, so we could not have more sessions, but I liked to teach him. In the last session, we discussed about addition of fractions. If we get a half cake (\(\frac{1}{2}\)) and a half cake (\(\frac{1}{2}\)) together, \begin{eqnarray*}  \frac{1}{2} + \frac{1}{2} = \frac{1+1}{2} = \frac{2}{2} = 1, \end{eqnarray*} it becomes 1. If we add fractions with like denominators, we only add numerators. We discussed why we did in this way and what this meant. Then I told him a story. The boy's favorite soccer player tried to shoot the goal twice in a game, and he succeeded once. His goal ratio of this game is \(\frac{1}{2}\). (Two shoots, one goal) The next game, again he tried to shoot the goal twice in the game, and again he succeeded once. His goal ratio of the game is again \(\frac{1}{2}\). Let's think about his goal ratio to get two games together. For these two games, he tried four goal...

Every person thinks by words. Thus words are important for me, too. Especially I need to write programs to realize an idea through the words. We can easily find that one word has sometimes a few meanings. People make a joke from it. I think one word has a few meaning is quite natural. For instance, ``run'' has a few meaning. I run as I move fast by foot. I can run a shop. A movie is now running at the theater. In English, it has more meanings with a short word (run after, run away, run out, ...), however, you have already seen the ``run'' itself has a few meanings. When we used only one language, we hardly noticed this multiple meaning of a word. However, when we learn foreign languages, we need to notice this through the translation. We can easily see one word usually has more than one translation in a dictionary. When we learn a foreign language, we can usually see the deepness of both our own language and the foreign language. In literature, especially in poems, us...

My closest person offered him a volunteer to fight Ebola. He is just a programmer and neither a doctor nor a nurse, so I wonder what he can do for that. However, the frontline people need not only doctors and nurses, but also support people. He found a position of IT, the frontline people will establish a data center for outbreak and information hub. I asked him, ``Don't you have a fear to do that?'' He answered me, ``I'm scared.'' The Ebola has a high risk of death, 50 to 90% of death ratio once infected. There is no good medicine for it yet. But he thought, the outbreak must be stopped there and must be stopped still we can. He told me he doesn't have any family, so he just felt that he does it better than someone who has a family does. Although he clearly sees what he should do, still his hand was trembled when he pushed the ``send'' button of the application form. For one week just after he sent the form, he continue to think about what he ...

I call a fraction time ``Gap time''. A gap time is for instance, a time I am waiting for my next train, a time I am waiting for someone at a cafe, my commute time, and so on. Everyday I have some fraction time that I need to wait something a bit. I have a volunteer work for translating education materials. I often use this ``gap time'' for it. I'm a lazy person, therefore I could hardly find some amount of continuous time for my volunteer work. I believe if I work hard, I cannot continue it. Thus my strategy is ``don't work hard, do just small amount only, but continue everyday for long time.'' I translate Khan Academy  learning materials and its site to Japanese and German. I could translate English to Japanese alone, but I need some help for German translation. I ask to help for this at the lunch break gap time. When I and my colleagues go to lunch, I ask someone to proofread my translation while we are waiting for our coffee. This is a lunch break...